Thomas Adam @[email protected]

@thomasadam I love how they keep misspelling XFree86 as "X-386". X386 according to Wikipedia lasted about a year, first released in 1991 and became the basis of Xi Graphics' Accelerated-X. XFree86 sprang up from X386 code in 1992 and from what I can see, "replaced" X386.

That project fell apart because of a license change that the developers did not like (my recollection is hazy, but Wikipedia says it happened in 2004 and was because the new license was GPL-incompatible), so X.org forked from the very last commit before said license change, and work carried on from there. XFree86 withered and died.

I digress though…

That thread seems to be showing all the arrogance of the modern UI designers who seem to think being able to differentiate a pushbutton from plain text is old hat. (…and I'm sooo tired of scroll-bar peek-a-boo!) I've tried various Wayland environments on numerous occasions, but there are places where Wayland just isn't ready.

A big contributor to this is the fact that pretty much everything relies on co-operation with the compositor, and all the compositors have their own way of doing things. x11vnc for example just connects to the X server and allows you to expose any X11 desktop you have the credentials for, be it Gnome/KDE or any WM. wayvnc won't work unless you have a wlroots-based desktop (which means not KDE or Gnome).

On-screen keyboard support is a crapshoot too: I have a keyboard-less tablet computer that I have tried various Wayland desktops, and the inability to bring up a fully-featured on-screen keyboard is crippling. Best I've been able to do is a crappy iOS-like OSK with no Control, Alternate or function keys … and punctuation on a separate "layer" so I feel like I'm punching data in via a ITA-2 teletype. Totally buggers my password muscle memory!

Screenreaders I hear have big problems with keybindings… because once again the compositor is in charge of that, and like a "herd" of cats, are going about it their own special way.

This feels a lot like doing DHTML in the early 90s, with a "Netscape" way and a "Microsoft" way of doing things… the answer there was the W3C specifying a "standard" that both parties were held to.

I think Wayland will need to do the same thing, and it is what X was doing. There were a lot of X extensions that are no longer in use, but a good number of them were also implementing features that catered for such edge cases as the ones I mention above.

Sure, the choice of DE is rather sparse at the moment, but that will improve: there weren't a lot of X11 desktop environments in the early 90s either… I seem to recall Gnome and KDE were circa 1997~1998 or so… a good decade after X itself came out.

But not a lot will improve until there is some sort of API standardisation in Wayland, and that is the point people keep missing.

#Wayland #X11

I keep a copy of #fvwm3 source to test or report bugs. After a long while I had update the source today; in CHANGELOG* found:

Buildsystem: deprecating #autotools for #meson/muon #1068 <https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/discussions/1068> by ThomasAdam @thomasadam c 202410.

#softwareDev #windowManager

Hardware -> Kernel -> Wayland -> X11 Server -> UI Toolkit -> Application

That’s the correct design.

Hardware -> Kernel -> Wayland -> UI Toolkit -> Application

That’s the wrong design.

See, the X11 server provides stuff that UI toolkits shouldn’t have to, and that Wayland shouldn’t be made to. Xorg is old and crusty and hard to maintain. The X11 protocol isn’t the problem. Don’t throw away mature solutions just because it’s not new and shiny.

I’ve just heard that Andy Emmerson (G8PTH) passed away this morning

A lifelong telephone, radio and TV enthusiast he regularly published articles in wireless and electronics magazines throughout the 70s,80s,90s and 2000s, he also founded the UKs largest telephone collectors group

He sold me my first two plesseyphones!

He was an all round smashing chap who will be greatly missed. Here’s a recording he made in the 70s

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=15tsrrjmBuY
and
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p6lAaVVJ7tE

Cheers Andy!

Hypothetically: if there was a service offering after-market open-hardware sodium-ion batteries for old laptops at a reasonable price, would you be interested in buying them and, if so, how many? I'm talking about old Thinkpads and such. Information about the specific devices would also be useful.

Edit to add: LiFePO4 would almost certainly also be available; there's negligible additional work to support both. Li-Ion is less likely but possible if there's demand.

Edit: I wouldn't normally ask, but since the entire point of this interest is to gauge interest, boosts are definitely welcomed and requested :)

Thanks, glad you like it! It's true, some of these images really do look like they're generated -- and it's even more surreal actually seeing it live, as well as the movement there's a texture to the air that's different from fog or clouds.

The colors weren't static but I wouldn't say they were swirling last night (although there was one other time we saw them were they were defintely dancing).

We've never seen them from our house (we have a lot of trees around so can't see anything low in the sky) ... there's a park that's about a 15-minute drive from here that has fairly good viewing, another one 30-40 minutes away that's even better (because the sky is darker). We find the Glandale app (https://aurora-alerts.uk/ ) very useful for knowing whether ror not it's worth making the effort -- unlike other apps I know of, it's tuned to our location, and predicts the timing of the substorms when things are likely to be especially good. Of course it's not an exact science, often we don't wind up seeing anything, but when it's good it's really good!

@thomasadam

@thomasadam That's been my go-to multiplexer for years. ​

Big news for small /usr partitions https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251112121631 #openbsd #sysupgrade #install #upgrading #usr #smalldisks #freesoftware #libresoftware

@claudiom @thomasadam

Meager beef ribs and some bratwurst.

My goodness, man, knowing you, that's probably enough to feed a family of 12! 😂